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A kanban layer on top of GitHub Issues, built on nights and weekends, listed with a broker in mid-May and sold for its full $128,000 asking price by mid-June
$24 / $49 / $99 monthly tiers, most customers on $24 · peak MRR stated as "just over $44,000" in the transcript, which cannot be right at that sale price (see credibility)
"I just remember finding it quite surreal that I was able to pull in six figures as a mid-20-year-old, just building some software on my laptop in cafes on the nights and weekends."
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
In 2015, GitHub Issues was deliberately stripped down. Teams would start there because it sat inside the workflow they already used — open a pull request, review it on github.com — but the moment they wanted to prioritise issues or see them on a kanban board, there was nothing. GitHub Projects did not exist yet. Derrick Reimer built CodeTree to fill that hole: a project management app on top of GitHub Issues, in his words "similar to Linear or Jira but a bit simpler," for smaller software teams who wanted to keep using GitHub Issues and needed a little more structure. The important context is that it was never his main job. He was working with Rob Walling — the interviewer — on Drip essentially full-time, and CodeTree got eight to ten hours a week on nights and weekends. He describes it as getting his feet wet as an entrepreneur, "some might call it indie hacking these days." The decision to sell came when Drip started working. He felt stretched thin, knew he was leaving growth on the table because he couldn't commit the time, and decided to cash out the value rather than let it stagnate. He listed with a broker in mid-May 2016, had a serious buyer in the pipeline by June 1st, wrapped negotiations in a couple of days, and closed due diligence by mid-June — about a month end to end. The price was $128,000, which was exactly what he had asked for. His trophy purchase was a roughly $1,500 espresso machine, which he says he still talks about publicly because he loves it that much.
CodeTree never had to start from a cold audience, because it started inside someone else's. The product read and wrote GitHub Issues, so a team adopting it kept its existing tracker, its existing repos and its existing workflow.
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Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickEvery claim traces back to a listed source — open any of them and check the number yourself. Timestamps jump to the second each figure is said.
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2:32 · hear it in the videoThe exact line behind each figure is in the Unicorn Club. Read the quote, then jump to the second it's said. Join the Unicorn Club
Data credibility: First-person founder interview on the MicroConf channel, with no dashboards or documents shown on camera. The $128,000 sale price is stated twice — once by the founder and once by the host — and is internally consistent with the stated 3.5x SDE multiple, so we treat it as reliable. The peak revenue figure is not reliable: the auto-generated captions render it as "just over $44,000 MRR," which cannot be squared with a $128,000 sale at 3.5x seller's discretionary earnings (that multiple implies annual SDE of roughly $36,000). A peak of about $4,400 MRR fits the sale price almost exactly, but the founder does not clearly say that number, so we report the discrepancy rather than substitute our own figure. The pricing tiers ($24 / $49 / $99, most customers on $24), the 3.5x SDE valuation method, the mid-May-to-mid-June 2016 timeline, the two-or-three interested buyers, the annual-prepaid revenue dispute, the due-diligence requirements (read-only Stripe access, Baremetrics-class analytics, bank statements) and the ~$1,500 espresso machine are all founder-stated. The claim that multiples have since risen to roughly 5-7x is the founder's and host's shared impression, not cited data, and it refers to conditions around the recording rather than today. The product name is heavily mangled in the captions, appearing as "Cod tree," "Cod Tre" and "cachy." No country or city is stated anywhere in the transcript, so region is left null. Note also that the video is sponsored by a brokerage (Quiet Light), which is a reason to weigh the pro-broker framing carefully — though the specific mechanics he describes are consistent and checkable against any broker.
Pricing was conventional and deliberately low: three or four tiers at $24, $49 and $99 a month, scaled by number of projects and number of users rather than strictly per seat. Most customers sat on the $24 plan, with a few on the larger tiers.
The honest answer is that it half turned, and the story reads better for saying so. The self-reinforcing part was structural.
The flat stretch here was not doubt about the product. It was attention.
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